Wilson Bentley: Dew on a Spider Web, c. 1910 – Porcelain Art Mug

A spider's web, hung with dew, photographed at first light. Every drop is a lens. Bentley set his camera in front of it and made the water do what the snow crystals did: hold still long enough to be seen.

He was a farmer in Jericho, Vermont. In 1885, aged nineteen, he bolted a bellows camera to a microscope and made the first photograph of a snow crystal that anyone had ever made. That is what he is remembered for — five thousand crystals over forty-six winters, and the sentence everyone repeats without knowing whose it was: no two are alike.

Snow was only the winter half of it. The rest of the year he photographed dew, raindrops, frost — the whole of what water does when it is left alone. These are the plates nobody quotes, and they are the ones that show him as a photographer rather than a collector.

Here the geometry is not the water's but the spider's: the radial threads and the spiral, drawn out by an animal working in the dark, made visible by an animal working at dawn. The drops are strung along the silk at even intervals, the way beads are strung on a wire. That is surface tension, and it happens whether or not anyone is there with a camera.

The plate is printed as a band that runs right round the mug. There is no centre and no edge to this pattern; wherever you set the mug down, the web carries on.

Fine Porcelain — 10 oz. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

Wilson Alwyn Bentley (1865–1931), [Dew on a Spider Web], c. 1910. Gelatin silver print, 7.6 × 9.2 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2015.202, Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2015. Open Access, CC0.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.